Samantha at the St. Louis Exposition eBook

The two pipes havin’ the lowest notes a small
horse can walk through or two good-sized men standin’
side by side. So you can imagine the streams
of melody that can float through them immense channels.
It has one hundred and forty stops, every one on ’em
that will stop if told to quick as a wink.

It took a train of ten cars to bring it from Los Angelus
where it wuz made. You can imagine how its music
fairly shakes the ground and carries you off your
feet, seemin’ly like the very music of the spears.

Good land! what’s Tirzah Ann’s organ compared
to it? And I thought that wuz as good as any
they make, the agent said it wuz; we paid over sixty
dollars for it.

And who do you think dedicated this most beautiful
structure that wuz ever built, to the music of the
biggest organ in the world’? Why, it wuz
woman, my own female sect. I tell you it made
me proud to think on’t. It wuz told me
by one that wuz there that it wuz filled with wimmen
on that occasion, and as many men as could git in
after the wimmen wuz seated.

Jest think on’t, oh, my sect! who have been
used to sneakin’ up back stairs to look down
on men seated in state at banquet tables, or peak
from the gallery at the Capitol to see ’em nobly
engaged in makin’ laws to govern her, tellin’
her how to spend the money she earned herself, and
how long to send her to jail, and where and when to
hang her, and etcetery; while she could only jest
peak at ’em. Oh, my soul! wuzn’t it
a agreeable state of affairs the doin’s here
at Festival Hall? As I said to Josiah as we sot
there, “Don’t it show my sect is lookin’
up?”

And he said he never found wimmen backward in lookin’
up, he said he never see a place that would dant ’em
and stop their tongues from waggin’. He
made light of the great incident and would been glad
to had men dedicate it; indeed he jest the same as
told me he felt the Exposition had stood in its own
light in not havin’ a certain leadin’
man in Jonesville, who wuz way up in political and
moral life, havin’ held the offices of path-master
and deacon. “But,” sez he, with some
bitterness of sperit and speakin’ skornfully:

“What if wimmen did dedicate it? They can
git up dressed in their silks and shiffoniers, and
talk, talk, but they can’t vote no matter how
well off they be. They’ve got to pony up
and pay taxes and toe the mark in law jest as men
tell ’em to.”

“Why,” sez he, warmin’ with his
subject, “we men can set on you in juries and
you can’t help yourselves, and hang you and so
forth. And you W.C.T.U. wimmen would have to
let your tax money go to pay for drinkin’ shacks
if we men of Jonesville, and the world, took it into
our heads to make you. Why,” sez he, lookin’
more and more big feelin’ as he went on, as
why shouldn’t he, as he recounted men’s
glorious advantages,